Whereas Barack Obama had never disguised his desire to step up the
military occupation of Afghanistan, while scaling down operations in
Iraq, he had promised — or had seemed to promise
— a thorough repudiation of the detention policies at Guantánamo and
Bagram, and the coercive interrogations and torture that had stalked
their cells and interrogation rooms.

However, although he promised to close Guantánamo
within a year and to uphold the absolute ban on torture in a series of
executive orders issued on his second day in office, fine words were
followed by months of inactivity, as a cautious Task Force of career
officials from government departments and the intelligence agencies was convened to review the Guantánamo cases.

The reviled Military Commission trial system for Guantánamo prisoners, which Obama had suspended on his first day in office, was reintroduced,
as was indefinite detention without charge or trial as an official
policy, even though this was the heart of the Bush administration’s
program, and even though progressive supporters of the President had
presumed that there were only two options for the remaining prisoners:
federal court trials, or release.

This was followed by another deeply unsavory official policy —
resisting any more embarrassing disclosures about the Bush
administration’s torture program by inappropriately invoking sweeping
“state secrets” privileges, as, for example, in the case of five men subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture, who sought to sue Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a Boeing subsidiary that had operated as the CIA’s torture travel agent.

Although Republicans in Congress — and cowardly members of Obama’s own party — bear considerable blame for the descent into paralysis
of those few parts of the President’s bold promises that he had not
already undermined voluntarily, the end result of the last 21 months of
cowardice and compromise is that, on foreign policy and national
security issues, there was little positive momentum that a shift of
political power in the mid-term elections could actually erode.

That said, losing control of the House of Representatives guarantees that anything the administration might have still contemplated doing — standing up to critics and insisting that, as announced a year ago,
the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others accused of
involvement in the 9/11 attacks will take place in federal court, or
moving any of the Guantánamo prisoners to a prison on the US mainland
— has no chance of happening at all, making the United States a
slightly gloomier place than it was before the mid-term elections.

Moreover, given the deepening of Obama’s paralysis that this
signifies, it also makes it seem less, rather than more likely that the
President and his party will be able to do anything meaningful to lure
back the progressive base that helped secure victory in 2008, in time
for the 2012 Presidential election, unless, by some miracle, someone
decides to try to rein in the Pentagon and the military-industrial
complex as an economic necessity (if for no other reason).

That, however, sounds too much like “hope” and “change,” which, to reiterate, are dead in the water in America today.

Further

In the face of increasingly catastrophic climate news - rising sea levels, wildfires, drought - a team of Russian photographers with the non-profit AirPano have taken to the air in helicopters, airplanes, dirigibles and hot air balloons to offer virtual and panoramic tours of the planet's most stunning locations, urban to wilderness, to remind us what's at stake. Take note.